The Most Creative Storytellers for Startups

Fanminder: Growing One’s Business

All stores have a similar problem. They need to keep customers coming back. They expend no shortage of effort on sales and marketing to accomplish this. Originally there was the yellow pages, which has now largely been replaced by Yelp. Stores can advertise in local mailers, hire people to walk around town passing out promotions, or run ads on the radio or TV. Somehow or another they need to get word out that they are in business.

In today’s day and age the internet is an essential part of every business. Somehow, someway businesses need to find a way to harness technology to connect with their customer base. This of course starts with a website, and then social media pages such as Facebook. But as many people have discovered the simple act of building an online presence doesn’t immediately equate to more customers. They need to find ways to reach out to their fans and give them reasons to enter their store. That’s where Fanminder comes in. It’s an integrated social media and mobile outreach tool that lets you get messages out to your fans.

The first thing Fanminder does is collects all your fans in a single location. This includes Facebook, mobile lists, Twitter, and fans from your own website. This creates a centralized fan club that everyone can be a part of. The ways you can grow your fan club are by using online sign-up forms or with real life signs. Fanminder provides customized professional quality signs for this purpose. To that end it’s been noted by many an internet marketer that offline marketing is still very valuable. Once fans join they have the opportunity to share the news with their friends as well.

But still, we have the issue of needing to give people a reason to join. I remember a friend of mine who signed me up for a newsletter once. I wasn’t overly thrilled about it but she said, “Oh, this is the fan club you want to be in.” Fanminder is a tool that lets you give your fans a reason to want to join as well. You can create customized offers to welcome fans into the club. And once they’re on the list they’ll continue to receive discounts that aren’t available otherwise.

One of the most powerful ways to connect with fans is through their mobile phones. People may ignore of miss updates on their Facebook page, or they may not check emails, but they do check text messages. As your mobile list grows you can send out discounts to them which will then be stored in their phones. What this means is first of all, they’ll read it. Secondly, they’ll have it with them when they’re near your store. People take their phones with them everywhere and will be able to access them right away. Promotions can be sent immediately or scheduled for future use.

The other benefit to sending messages out through Fanminder’s system is security. If you only want a promotion to be offered to a limited number of people then you can do that. The way it works is when fans want to redeem a promotion they text back the redemption code in the text coupon. Fanminder then checks to ensure it’s valid and returns a message that’s shown to your staff.

What this also does is enables complete tracking of all your promotions. You can see up to the minute graphs which show the growth of your fanbase, revenue generated from marketing efforts, and replies from fans. Fanminder’s system allows you to carry on a dialogue with fans as well.

Fanminder is a great tool to build and grow your fanbase. It allows you to entice customers in through multiple channels including their mobile phones. This gives you the ability to connect with them in a meaningful way so that they’ll receive the message and have the opportunity to respond. With it you can increase both sales and customer loyalty.